Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don't. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters' attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people's attitudes even after they are understood to be false. In a trio of experiments, I demonstrate that the effect is present in people's thinking about politics and amplified by party identification. I conclude by elaborating the consequences for theories of belief updating and strategic political communication.
Over at the Monkey Cage, David Park translates a bit. "If a Republican were to hear a negative story about a Democratic candidate," he writes, "his impression of the Democratic candidate becomes worse. However, when it is revealed that the information was false, his opinion of the Democratic candidate does not return to its initial state, instead his belief lies somewhere between the initial state and the false state."
So let's be clear on how this works: Bob the Republican gets an e-mail saying Barack Obama is a Muslim, spent his early years in madrassas, and had been cynically implying a Christian faith in order facilitate his campaign. Bob takes from this that Obama is untrustworthy, possibly disloyal, and probably a bit dangerous. Then, Bob's watching the news, and they cut to a segment on this smear, showing it to be a heap of falsehoods and racist insinuations. Bob stops believing in the smear, but is still left with the vestigial impression that Obama is untrustworthy, etc. The damage remains, even as the causal facts are erased.
The implications, of course, are enormous. When a particularly loathsome campaign is launched, or particularly untrue fliers distributed, simply beating back the argument in the media is not nearly enough. The damage, once done, is done, finished, absorbed. What sort of strategy that militates towards -- save, maybe, for a constant, ceaseless, offense -- is a bit hard to divine, but it's certainly depressing, and it suggests that a campaign unwilling to attack, but willing to counterattack, runs at a severe disadvantage.
